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research online and discovered that Sheri’s Ranch, one of Nevada’s largest and most upscale brothels, garnered the best reviews from women in the trade. She sent the brothel a brief bio and pictures of herself; Sheri’s Ranch management liked what they saw and hired her in 2009.
    â€œThe first time I came here, I felt like I was on vacation. I didn’t have to cook for two weeks, and I could lay out by the pool,” Anna says.
    I met Anna the day I drove out to Sheri’s Ranch, which sits in the dusty desert town of Pahrump, an hour west of Las Vegas. She had been asked by the madam to give me the grand tour.
    Anna (her brothel name) is pretty, with radiantly clear skin, a sweet smile, and long, witch-black hair. She is dressed in a short, low-cut cocktail dress that hugs her butt and shows off her figure. Yet her legs are not particularly toned and she is not big-breasted. What catches your attention are her eyes, dark green and strikingly luminous. She exhibits a sweet perkiness reminiscent of the girl next door.
    Indeed, Anna is the girl next door. She grew up in a middle-class home in a suburb of Philadelphia. Although her father is an engineer and her mother a beautician, she comes from a large family and her parents weren’t able to contribute much to her college education. So she took out substantial loans to pay the tuition at a private liberal arts college in New York, from which she graduated with double majors in communication studies and psychology.
    For the past four years, she has been working at Sheri’s Ranch, two weeks on and one week off. In the beginning, she commuted between Florida and Las Vegas; she was picked up at the airport in Las Vegas and transported to Pahrump via the brothel’s free limousine service for customers and workers. After a few months, her husband came to live with her in Las Vegas and transferred to the University of Nevada. They rented out their house in Florida.
    Her family, she says, has no idea what she does for a living. “The misconceptions [about sex work] are so numerous, they wouldn’t understand,” she says. “The public thinks we’re all uneducated drug addicts, and that’s not true.”
    At Sheri’s Ranch, each woman works a five-day-a-week shift. For the first two days, the women are on call for twenty-four hours, and then, for the duration of their shift, they are on call for twelve hours, Anna says. She sees an average of two or three customers a day, although there are also days when she sees no one.
    â€œI’m going to be on the lower end of what most girls make because I’m pretty picky,” Anna says. “I might have one or two big parties versus lotsof little ones. My parties generally last a couple of hours to all night. It’s more of a girlfriend experience than slam bang, thank you, ma’am.” Even so, Anna clears between $2,500 and $5,000 a week in take-home pay. She has already paid off the bulk of her student loans.
    â€œI wish I’d known about [Sheri’s Ranch] sooner, I could have made more money,” Anna says, as she shows me a room that she calls the “formal dining room,” where “a gentleman can take us out to dinner and clothing is optional.” In the center of the room is a small, oval table draped with an elegant tablecloth and set for two; a still-life hangs on the wall behind the table, and two brass light fixtures on the mantelpiece complete the Victorian parlor effect.
    Anna smiles sweetly. “If he wants a blow job under the table, there is a kneeling pillow and a splatter platter,” she says and then adds, “although now that everyone has to wear condoms, there’s no splatter.”
    Mandatory condoms are one of the non-negotiable rules at Sheri’s Ranch and indeed at all of Nevada’s legal brothels. The women who work in the state’s brothels also must get tested for sexually transmitted diseases every